


Princess of Glass

by Agonist



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/F, Not really a shipfic but TZ is there to flirt, Other, Trans Rose Lalonde
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-05
Updated: 2020-08-05
Packaged: 2021-03-06 04:54:15
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,695
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25737607
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Agonist/pseuds/Agonist
Summary: What is it like to live in the flesh of a goddess, Rose Lalonde? Does it feel good? Do you feel like a woman? Have you earned  it?OR: "GIRLS JUST WANNA HAVE A GOD COMPLEX"
Relationships: Rose Lalonde/Terezi Pyrope
Comments: 2
Kudos: 10





	Princess of Glass

It’s been three years and you’ve not missed one beat. In the span of a day, you processed the metanarrative significance behind the worsening assault of visions that had you bedridden for a year, avoided a tantalizing drop down the unfathomable abyss of solipsism, rehomed your consciousness into an automaton’s fuselage and taken up residence in a spaceship of agonizingly English interior decor sensibilities skyjacked by your ectofather. No one would accuse your faceplate of betraying any expression other than stoic impassivity. These metallic lips, these ocular receptors with protective plating concealed in the form of flawless black eyeshadow, they’re incapable of delating you. You’ve been named a “goddess” before by the populace of the universe you immanentized. Your own theology is not as easily swayed by light shows - you knew you were but an amateur hero with access to the engines of creation.

And, loathe as you are to admit it, heroes have limits. Call it a curse of adaptability, or a blessing of detachment. Regardless, the revolution of your life’s conditions was aided by the same inhuman speed of thought that now turns into screaming static at the barest hint of idleness. It’s been an interminable three years. You’re long out of fresh cinema to watch in the projection room. Your travel companions are not companionable. Your writing is rote, wearisome. All this time, you’ve neglected to pay attention to the basic materials constituting your present, maybe final, form. You may be a robot, or a deity. Humans are not brought into the world with a full map of the Theseus installed in their brain. Today is the last day you ignore the room tucked away beside unoccupied quarters, the tantalizing label of “dance hall”. In lieu of windows, an arrangement of LEDs on the wall breathe airy illumination over simple wooden tile. The wall across is paneled in even more mirrors than the gym Dirk has taken up permanent residence in. You were never a huge fan of those either. Perhaps your limited exposure to jock biospheres is why you expected the dance hall to be cluttered with equipment of imposing magnitude. Instead, only a pair of barres stand perpendicular at a respectful distance from the center of the room. Any more, you reason, and the movements of a troupe would be restricted at best. Did Jake hope to extract a dancing crew out of the, generously, limited physicality of his extended friend group, or was this room intended all for himself? Oh, there’s a pole. Naturally.

You approach the rail and think twice before grabbing it. Nothing in your movement betrays your temporary titubation. Your hand doesn’t come up to the halfway point, interrupt itself and slide dejected back to its starting placing. No one could parse your faltering. Not even you when your first testy steps manifest you in the mirror’s view. Your body is new. Your vivid awareness of the degree of fine control you’re exerting over every nerve terminal is not. There’s a small tilt of your head forward, consequence of many years spent writing. You’ve made moderate efforts to correct your sitting postural health, but there is an undeniable betterment to your flow of ideas when you sit in the bizarre positions your friends affectionately describe as “gay sitting”, ranging anywhere from cross-legged to draped over your chair like a tablecloth. So there are all sorts of diminute left-right imbalances, of the kind that weigh on everyone but only the most perspicacious notice on themselves. They are hazards of life. Bodies are made to endure, and balance against a constellation of microscopic adjustments that, together, concert a grace all their own. This is your most natural poise, the one you adopt when either alone or in the presence of people whom you have nothing to prove to - a coterie whose membership you can count on one hand’s fingers. You don’t dislike it. Well, the dragging feet are new, but you suppose you should’ve expected it, given the time you spent afflicted by a nameless sickness of the metaphysical that almost scorched your consciousness from the inside out.

No, you don’t dislike it. You knew to demand respect no matter how you carried yourself. But it could be more dignified. Your body rearranges to the command of composure. Your chin tucks down and back, followed by your neck and shoulders. Before, the front of your neck would pop as readjustment ground against its stressed musculature. Now your articulations reposition without so much as a mechanical whir. The heaviness of your illness leaves your feet. It’s not a matter of appearing larger; an absurd proposition, given you were 5’4 at your tallest. It’s got more to do with machining your body so it transmits its collected power to your words. If only it were as easy as mastering words alone. When you were thirteen and all you had to do to appear as a woman with all her shit together was bicker over the internet in thesauric prose, it felt as if words sufficed. But you grew up, as did the world. Layers of silk wave their delicate folds from your shoulder to just atop the ridge where cleavage might begin insinuating. There is a Strider-Lalonde masculinity in the stiffness of your chest, an expression of bone structure that has survived your transition from sheltered child to reclusive divinity to steel. Dirk, seeing as he made the body, or even Roxy, whose admirably inscrutable identity holds court in the mercuriality of genders past and future.

“Masculine” is not a word you’ve applied to yourself in a decade.

Maybe it’s in the forceful strength with which you mark your steps. Maybe it’s the way you constrain your fluidity so as to walk in a straight line. Or maybe it’s in the innumerable pressure points where stored tension complicates the language of your corporality. But now you’ve been endowed with a form of terrific and terrifying perfection, devoid of the history of struggles that once made their home beneath your skin. All it takes is one click, not even an audible one; a silent word, a mental non-effort, and the woman in the mirror is freed. Lissome ease surges from your heels, up your legs, coiling through the engines of your hips and releasing them again for the first step - the first true step you’ve taken in this form. Your mind is quiet at last. It delivers its intricate calculations to a hypertuned body which expends no effort, glides feline across the tiles. Nothing of your movement betrays the depth of your awareness. It is dexterous, light and uncomplicated. The nimble ease of its confidence is statelier than the rigid regality you’ve abandoned. It’s exquisite. You’re exquisite.

You place one hand on the rail, a sacrifice to the same fears that led primitive men to decollate sheep atop slabs of stone. Man saw fear in the heavens, painted it atop cavern walls, carved it into stone and cast it into metal. Your balance remains as placid with the barre as without. You are not of man. Not anymore. Rather than return to your side, your hand swims above your head in one gentle, smooth motion. Your primary examination found the ballerina shoes affixed to your feet rather comical; you had to, in order to protect you from the question which took root in the soil of your mind. All your weight stabilizes on the tips of your toes, en pointe as if you’d been training for it all your life. Your dress billows up, weightless, and down. In the valleys of silk tapered by the filigree sashed around your waist, light and shadow’s minute dance presages your own. You admire the equilibrium of your body, frozen in a position that demands the undivided concentration of every volt and amp and conviction that courses through you, all without petrifying. There is only lightness, and the next step. Never have you felt more as a Goddess, capital G, as you do now, reflected in the paradox of your omnipotence:

Can God be imperfect if it wants to?

By default, you’re wired to receive sensations simultaneously, in comfortable imitation of the human mind’s boundaries. You blink, decelerating your perception until the ersatz tandem of light speed is erased. The millimetric joys of your empyrean form suspend with an indulgence that would put the best slow-motion cameras of Earth C to shame. Attoseconds and millennia before the radiant figure in the mirror reaches your photosensitive cells, you feel your jump in the gentle caress of still air against your cheek. One arm is wrapped around your waist, palm up to receive the world. Its paired opposite stays high, cutting into the interrogant of absolute freedom. Granted the power to move in any configuration, it has chosen to reach for undaunted heaven. Your legs pay one requisite, curt bow to the ground, and leaves it behind. Pointe work was meant to emulate the ethereal sylph, the breeze that stills only when it wishes to. You could keep flying forever. Gravity, on its knees, begs to have you back. You oblige out of nothing but gracious delight, not before swapping your legs so you’ll land with the left ahead of the right in consummate symmetry of your starting position.

Your prelude lasted less than one second; yet, in its endless fascination, it carried the spirit of the entire oeuvre. Exuberant, you decide against restraint, chaining into the next jump the instant your feet land. This one ought to be long, an arabesque that explores all five corners of the flaming star you’ve become. Your legs split the air in half. Though you soar forth, the length of your arms toss back above your head, weighing nothing. You are not beholden to the strictures of the old masters. Summoning the wind? Only to fan the embers of rebirth. Aflame, the phoenix lands lifetimes away from its first hop. Sometimes a forest fire is needed to clear the old, ash it for the new.

But you don’t feel on fire. Not as your firebird jump, which ought to have extenuated you, flowed without pause into the next and the next. Not as you chanced a pirouette which halfway added a second spin for naught but the uncontainable triumph of it. Not even in that moment when you lost track of names and categories and became possessed by a movement without technique. One of the earliest questions you posited to Dirk regarding your new body was: can it hurt? From the moment you woke up until then, you hadn’t bumped into, slipped, tripped, dropped anything that would’ve led you to discover such programming, and opted against self-experimentation. From there followed the obligatory prosaic debate on whether he thought the experience of pain essential to mankind or to Rose Lalonde, diluted through so many platitudes and meretricious declarations that you may as well have been discussing bacteria on a petri dish. When he at last answered in the positive, you found yourself quietly glad for your new face’s inherent impassivity. You might’ve smiled, or grimaced. Both possibilities dismay you the same. But why should this hurt? In humans, the body fires pain to signal that it is reaching its acceptable limit of wear. You have no such limit. If you so pleased, your next tour jeté could send you rocketing to the roof. With judicious application of momentum, you could even manage a pleasant landing, cratering neither your chassis nor the floor’s finish.

Instead, you keep it low, one hand grasping towards the purpose of your dance. You thought grace meant holding the world at your mercy, with such might that even your own form became immaterial. But you shudder at every impossible twirl you ideate. Their grasp lies through the princess of glass in the mirror, unbruised because she is so fragile. If you scrape her, if you look too hard in her direction, she will splinter forever. Everything that made you graceful before hurt to master. Scrapes and bruises on a too-young girl, supporting your drunk mother up the stairs of a haunted house; at the world’s end, you jumped on the back of a cyclops and impaled your will into its eye. Hours spent poring over nightmares in fiction, the only words that spoke to your restless ache. Soon enough, you’d begun enjoying your status as the most eloquent among your friends. The parsimonious pace of hormones, a second puberty magnifying all of the first’s indignities through the looking glass of age where most are done with growing, and the little pleasures traced where your skin shifted to accommodate regrowth. Such grace, difficult and forceful, was yours. What is it you have now?

You lay one hand on the barre. Barre is not a word you knew. Engaging your blessed vision triggers the filters concatenated to your processing power, an ungentle reminder that this body exists to serve a primary purpose. That purpose is to sift through the droves of alternate histories whose sheer volume once threatened to sear your brain, until you See the one you are looking for: this one, the prose your internal narrative has built for this odyssey. Only a pair of barres. You’d never known there was a proper name for the beams on which the dancers whose fleet-footed gaiety elicited your sighs found support. This idiom was fed to you by the dictionary ingrained to your internal storage. If you’d been at a loss for words, you might have come up with a more florid descriptor, even if at the cost of clarity. You never minded sacrificing visibility for lyricality; you did it often, in your too-short career as a wordsmith, just for the gratification of mystifying your readers. If you were feeling laissez-faire, you might’ve declared them “bars” and left it at that. Both possibilities are the futile flapping of a flightless bird. You are now as the eagle, whose unerring eye never misses its mark. There is no questioning your perfect declamations. You compact, in necessary words, the unique curvature and the luster relucent though black and the asymmetrical parallels of the frame’s design into only a pair of barres. That is what you have now. Metal and minimalism.

TEREZI: YOU KNOW FOR 4 WH1L3 1 F3LT PR3TTY CH34T3D OUT OF G3TT1NG TO S33 TH3 UN1V3RS3 1 H3LP3D CR34T3

TEREZI: BUT NOW 1M 4CTU4LLY GL4D 1 M4N4G3D TO 4VO1D D4M4G1NG MY S1GHT GLOB3S W1TH HUM4N D4NC3

TEREZI: UNT1L NOW TH4T 1S

Right. For a second, you’d forgotten privacy on the Theseus is aspirational. Terezi leans against the doorframe. More accurately, she leans against the consecutive layers of radiation-green polyester whose repugnance she terms an “outfit”, which in turn happen to lean against the doorframe. She has little in mind other than trying your patience, as became customary for her sometime around the start of this journey’s third year. You’ve long run out of fresh cinema to watch in the projection room, so you’ve learnt to draw entertainment from your little spats, at least in the same manner a prisoner must extract essential nourishment from gruel.

ROSE: Would I be correct in assuming such transparently flawed provocation was in fact a decoy to lure me into unwitting participation in a verbal dispute?

TEREZI: YOU WOULD B3

TEREZI: N3XT 1 W4S GO1NG TO S4Y

TEREZI: 1 DONT N33D TO S33 TH3 SM3LL OF P4WB34ST W4ST3 YOUR TW1RLS L34V3 B3H1ND >:]

ROSE: Our comedy act is enviable. Whichever ghosts of Groucho Marx survive, loitering about our surplus of doomed timelines, must now all be simultaneously engaged in the act of eating their spectral hearts out.

TEREZI: WHOS GROUCHO M4RX >:?

ROSE: The father of communism. Is there something you need?

TEREZI: D1RK W4NTS YOU 1N TH3 4FT

ROSE: Doesn’t he always?

TEREZI: Y3S

TEREZI: SO YOU C4N G1V3 M3 4 F3W S3CONDS OF YOUR PR3C1OUS T1M3

TEREZI: TO 3XPL41N TO M3 WH4T TH3 FUCK TH4TS 4LL 4BOUT

When Terezi crosses her arms, it does not make her appear on the defensive. Maybe it’s the officerial scrutiny fixed in her interlocutor’s direction, as if she were merely considering the best manner for dismantling them. Arms-crossed is your own default. You are both belligerent people. One minute spent ogling the curvature of your own robotic posterior and suddenly you’re an expert in body language. She’s looking - smelling - straight through you, into the dance hall.

TEREZI: W3LL DUH 1 4LR34DY M4D3 FUN OF YOU FOR 1T

TEREZI: BUT WHY

ROSE: Are you familiar with the concept of “fun”, Pyrope?

TEREZI: 1F TH3R3S 4NYTH1NG 1V3 L34RNT OV3R MY P4ST THR33 Y34RS ON TH1S SP4C3SH1P

TEREZI: 1TS TH4T YOU 4ND 3V3RYON3 WHO SH4R3S YOUR P3ST1L3NT G3N3T1C M4T3R14L H4S 4 T3N L1GHT-Y34R POL3 UP TH31R W4ST3CHUT3

ROSE: Fine, you’ve caught me. I couldn’t help but notice my father had affixed ballerina shoes to the feet-analogues of my new body.

ROSE: I thought it would be a disservice to not test them out. Indeed, this body is exquisitely attuned to the strictures of ballet, even if the rigors of standing en pointe are lost on you.

TEREZI: WHY H4DNT YOU T3ST3D 1T B3FOR3?

ROSE: I was busy having my private time interrupted by the vicissitudes of the living space which I happen to share with a nosy troll girl.

TEREZI: OH SO 1TS PR1V4T3

God damn it all. There’s always a slip-up. Every time you’re roped into one of Terezi’s absurd tit-for-tats instead of walking away, you reveal more about yourself. It is as if she could smell the mist of phantasmal blood clinging to your chassis.

Ah. But a mere minute ago, you were terrified by the possibility that you’d never make a mistake again. Where your mask can only mimic deadpan, expression has never left Terezi’s face, a demonic grin lending preternatural might to her words. You enjoy florid prose, and she, blunt litigation. You’ve at least a heart for color combination, and she dresses like a bowl of confectionery; and, confronted by her, you wish again you had that deific grace, that you could lord it over her.

ROSE: Apparently not anymore.

ROSE: It is a common room. You are free to join me anytime.

TEREZI: WH4T 1V3 4LR34DY W4TCH3D OF YOUR HUM4N D4NC3 1S 3NOUGH TO G1V3 M3 N1GHTM4R3S FROM H3R3 UNT1L W3 L4ND TH4NK YOU V3RY MUCH

ROSE: I didn’t propose we dance together, but that’s an interesting leap of logic on your part.

ROSE: I’m sure I could adjust to a troll dance.

Terezi offers no reply. She’s reeled back her sharklike instincts to give your proposal the full weight of her consideration. She’s at her scariest like this. You seize the silence with one step forward, uncrossing your arms to make the offer:

ROSE: You may lead.

It’s a double-edged proposal. As a mere human, any troll girl whose blood coursed above a certain limit on the hemospectrum would’ve been capable of crushing you, literally, as if you were a ball of paper in their hands. It’s not a limit you were ever given to exploring. Though, you’ll admit with bitter placidity, you did long to. You parsed out much of this desire in your earliest, most scandalous published novels, exploring - by destroying - the purported impossibility of kismesissitude between troll and human. You consider it no coincidence that there soon followed a wave of humans initiating open interest in such relationships, where before they’d remained underground, if not necessarily taboo. For your part, you steered clear of the spades option in dating apps and stayed faithful to your beloved betrothed. That is not a reminiscence you enjoy treading. Instead, you focus on the hardening of Terezi’s facial features. She is stolid, enigmatic, an impressive feat when you consider the magnitude of her usual smile pushes the boundaries of biological possibility. But, when she’s not trying to decipher her peers, the length of her own silence gives her away.

ROSE: You can’t dance.

TEREZI: NOT L1K3 TH4T

ROSE: You mean without tripping on the flame-decaled sports cars you call shoes?

TEREZI: HOW DO3S 4NYON3 SUFF3R YOU?

ROSE: I’m not the one wired to process that query.

TEREZI: 1 G3T IT YOUR3 4 ROBOT

TEREZI: DO YOU PL4N TO K33P TH4T UP UNT1L WE L4ND?

ROSE: Maybe more, if it continues flustering you so.

TEREZI: UGH

ROSE: My point being, the one who hunted me down for conversation was you.

TEREZI: MY PO1NT B31NG

TEREZI: 1 ONLY L1K3 TH3 P4RT WH3R3 1 DO TH3 T4LK1NG

TEREZI: WH3N3V3R 1 L3T YOU DO 1T MY GR4Y M4TT3R 1NST4NTLY L1QU3F13S 4ND B3G1NS OOZ1NG OUT OF MY TH1NKP4N  


ROSE: So you just want an emotional punching bag.

TEREZI: B34TS H34R1NG YOU COMM3NT4T3 ON 4N 4N1M3 MOV13 FOR TH3 S3V3NTH T1M3

You want to dig in deeper. You’re burning to extract the core of her resentful prodding and transparent projections; you want to hold it up to the light and watch the starlit dance of its many faces. It’s not as if you don’t know how much you remind her of a loved one. Like her, you have a high opinion of yourself, born out of verifiable hypercompetence. Like her, you’ve been to death and back. And, in this new body, you’re tall, like her. But Terezi Pyrope is a skilled combatant, with word and sword both. To make a play, you must show your hand. For now, you’ll postpone the risk of betraying your own intent. You want her to crack first.

ROSE: Take care. You’ve become dangerously entertaining.

ROSE: My full attention is not an easy beast to tame.

For once, you don’t wait for the riposte: you stride away from the dumbfounded, immobile Terezi with no care for the appearance of your mannerisms. The torment of your Light, too bright to behold with your own eyes, has calmed to a gentle sundown. It thrills you, to be taken to the verge of the precipice of shadows; almost exposed as facile, obsessive, flawed. Mirrors of glass show beauty where one already believes they behold it, filth where it does not. The perfect mirror, you decide, is made of flesh and cutting words. Not that you’d ever tell her as much.


End file.
